To commemorate The Bold and the Beautiful’s 28th anniversary last Wednesday, executive producer and headwriter Bradley P. Bell staged a daytime soap cliffhanger that is the shock of the soap century: revealing that Maya Avant (Karla Mosley) is really Myron, a transgender person. She was born a man.

You go, Bradley!

Karla Mosley: Her Maya Avant revealed to be transgender

Maya is a model at Forrester Creations and the live-in love of Rick Forrester (Jacob Young). The couple currently hosts the Forrester Mansion. It was in the living room at the end of last Wednesday’s episode that Maya’s sister Nicole (Reign Edwards) told Maya that she is not her sister but her brother. Wowsa! What a beginning to a storyline! The episode trended on Twitter immediately! B&B had managed to keep this stunning reveal top secret. Miraculously, there had been absolutely no spoilers!

Maya/Myron is not daytime’s first transgender character, contrary to what The Daily Mail (England’s gossipy newspaper/website) reported this week. That honor belongs to Azure C (Carlotta Chang) on The City. And then there’s Zarf /Zoe on All My Children. I loved Wendy Mercury (played by herself) the transgender bartender on One Life to Live. The great and mighty headwriter Claire Labine (Ryan’s Hope, General Hospital) created Wendy in 1997 in collaboration with her sub-writer children Eleanor Mancusi and Matthew Labine.

In real life, Wendy was/is an opera singer who back then acted by day and performed by night at an infamous drag club and restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Lucky Chang’s. She is just superb!

Maya/Myron is of course an homage to Myra Breckinridge, the 1968 novel by the late Gore Vidal that became a movie in 1970. Vidal was a noted author, playwright, satirist, raconteur and television personality with a taste for the flamboyantly shocking. His sexually explicit, luridly campy tale of a man who becomes a woman amid the sleazy culture of behind-the-scenes Hollywood was considered high scandal in its day.

Myra/Myron was film’s first transgender person, played in the equally explicit and truly awful movie version (some say the worst film of all time) by Raquel Welch, then hottest thing on the screen. It also co-starred the iconic Mae West (“Come up and see me sometime”) as Letitia Van Allen, a sexually voracious Hollywood agent with a four-poster bed in her office. It was the first movie for a very young and hunky Tom Selleck, before he made his breakthrough soap role on The Young and the Restless as Jed Andrews during that soap’s premiere year, 1973. In the movie, Selleck was billed simply as “Stud.”

Y&R was the first soap to focus on young people. It was co-created by the late legendary Bill Bell and his wife Lee Phillip Bell. They are the parents of Bill Jr, Bradley and Lauralee (Christine/Cricket Williams) and the co-creators of B&B as a spinoff to Y&R in 1987.

Raquel Welch as Myra Breckinridge

Of course Vidal’s Myra/Myron was created to sell the novel and the movie. She was a phenomenon of the late 60s just as the as mores of Hollywood were quickly changing. Old taboos were falling everywhere, and the book and movie were emblematic of a new era of sexual explicitness that would have seemed impossible just a few short years earlier. Myra/Myron, book and movie, brought in audiences by the zillions, just as Vidal planned.

And that’s exactly what Bradley P. Bell and CBS Daytime want Maya as a her/him to do for B&B, which already is the most popular soap opera worldwide. B&B doesn’t need to do this. But they did it. How high will the ratings spike for this week? For B&B, CBS and Bradley Bell, the sky is the limit!

This is not to disparage the subject of transgender identity and the very real issues it poses for many people who want and deserve society’s respect. GLAAD, the leading advocate in the media for gays, lesbians and transgender people, has come forward in support of this ostensibly ground-breaking storyline. Okay, but with all due respect to this worthy organization, this is not really such a groundbreaker for soaps. It will succeed or fail in proportion to how genuinely sensitive and realistic it is. Otherwise, it’s just another stunt.

Paul Rauch, surely the greatest executive producer in daytime soap history, died today in Manhattan at 79 following an illness.

Paul RauchNobody did soaps better

Marlena had the honor of covering and knowing Paul from 1980 onward, during which he was executive producer of Another World, Texas, One Life to Live, Santa Barbara. Guiding Light and The Young and the Restless. He generously taught me so much about soaps during our many interviews. In the industry, Rauch was known as intimidating, but I found him to be a tremendously charismatic and complicated man who was great creative leader and a premier innovator in the art of soaps. No one knew soap production better than Paul. He was always moving with the soap times. I always maintained he was a genius — which he loved. Rest in peace, Mr. Rauch.

He is survived by his wife, concert pianist/playwright Israela Margalit, two children, two stepchildren and three granddaughters.

When Paul became executive producer of his last soap, Y&R, in 2008 (the job lasted until 2011). Marlena wrote this column about having known him over the years:

PAUL RAUCH FOR REAL!

September 19, 2008

By Marlena De Lacroix a.k.a Connie Passalacqua Hayman

Paul Rauch. That name may send you screaming from the room if you ever worked for him unsuccessfully, if you judge a man in totality by his bad soaps (Santa Barbara, Guiding Light) or if you are a typical internet poster who relies on rumors, innuendo and chapters of tell-all memoirs.

But now that Rauch is back as co-executive producer of The Young and the Restless (at the age of 74, after recovering from a heart attack) I’d like to offer some first person testimony. And I can do it freely and ethically because I am a journalist, and don’t have to work for him. I knew and interviewed Rauch regularly from 1980-2001.

I’ve always maintained that, despite his stormy temperament and the people he is said to have hurt, Paul is a genius.

I knew him when he was in New York executive-producing Another World, Texas, One Life to Live and Guiding Light. Like everyone, I had terrible, terrible times with him (I have stories — let’s just say no one could intimidate a young girl reporter better than Paul) but then again I had incredibly engaging and enlightening conversations with him over the years, too.

Ironically, it is the same young students of soap opera out there cursing at him on the net who would probably die to have to chance to have an audience with him. Every time I interviewed Paul, I learned more in 20 minutes about the fine art of making soap opera than I ever could any other way. A serious art collector (it always cracked me up that Paul had a print of Edward Hopper’s classic painting “The Lighthouse at Two Lights” in his office at Guiding Light), he has an incredible eye for the visual composition and texture of the image on screen. Between that and his up-to-the-second technical knowledge, his explanations of such things as his lighting ideas, why he photographed scenes in radical new ways, and his innovative location shooting techniques, made you appreciate what he was after in a fresh way. Or he could make you understand why soaps are now casting models with perfectly beautiful faces by explaining why the technicalities of cable competition (which was new in the late 90s) called for such a (to me, awful) thing.

And he has amazing taste in actors. Before you scream “Kim Zimmer” at me, this is the man who gave great actors like Ray Liotta (he grew up on Another World) their show-biz starts. I used to see him all the time at the New York theater in the 80s scouting talent. He recognized and relished using superb leading actors like Vicky Wyndham (AW), Beverlee McKinsey (AW and Texas) and Erika Slezak (One Life To Live).

He’s produced soaps for 40 years (two Emmys), moving with the times from style to style. There were the classic, almost Shakespearean quality of AW (which was soap opera nirvana for the Thinking Fan); the campy, high budget days of OLTL, and even the very early days of GL (before he and those boobs Brown and Esensten poisoned us with the clone story).

Because he moves with the times and is a genuine Thinking Producer, Paul is a great choice for Y&R. Among other things, the show needs a definitive post-Bill Bell style, since it’s been drifting all over the place since Bill’s death. Y&R is his kind of show: it is rich in dramatic texture and has many sophisticated characters (the Abbots, the Newmans) that are tastefully wealthy. Although I haven’t seen Paul in years, I’m sure he still approaches his work with all the intensity and meticulous attention a show like Y&R badly needs to stay on top in these troubled, troubled soap times.

When I was a girl soap reporter, I called him “Mr. Bell” during interviews because of Bill Bell’s exalted status in the soap industry. And Bill Bell (1927-2005) would just laugh and go ahead to speak about what one always talked to him about: the work. He was the only person I ever interviewed who hardly ever promoted himself personally. And he was in show business! Bell, a true gentleman, preferred to have his work speak for itself.

So I’m glad there’s a new biography that both examines Bell’s personal life story and takes a comprehensive look at his always top-rated soaps. The book, published by Sourcebooks, is titled The Young and Restless Life of William J. Bell, Creator of The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful and written by veteran soap journalist Michael Maloney and Lee Phillip Bell, Bell’s wife, who also co-created both soaps.

Bill Bell had a wonderful life, told in this book with same kind of class that helped make him such a remarkable person in life and in television history.

There was never a day in his 40-plus years in the soaps when Bell’s writing wasn’t excellent and his soaps engrossing and entertainingly and intelligently done.. He, his soaps, his family and his organization were always all about class — and success. And on top of all this, he was a genuinely nice man.

Bill Bell really was the prototypical American success story of a man who started humbly and worked his way to the top. He came from a Midwest middle class family, served stateside during World War II, and [Read more…]

What’s a soap critic to do? There are only six soaps. I have a long memory and remember the very early 90s, when Bill Bell originated the homeless storyline with Stephanie, which way proceeded the current one. Ken Corday is an enemy of free speech; he sought to destroy the critical arm of Soap Opera Weekly years ago. But alas. The great and ultra creative Jim Reilly is dead and cursed now by Ken and followers. All that is long ago and distant — to some and those who were not in the daytime world long ago in the first place.

The root of criticism in daytime is executive change. You call for an executive change when you see a bad soap, a soap that is marked by cronyism, a soap that doesn’t move, or centers too long on one character or is marked by favoritism or sexism or inside politics. Yet, all the current headwriters and producers at daytime, as if in a time warp, seem locked into place. We have Ken, enemy of the First Amendment at Days of Our Lives. Fronsie eternal at ABC. All the Bells and the bravura Rauch at Y&R, Jill and Bob at General Hospital. They all seem to be [Read more…]

My friend Ed Martin weighs in, too, on the loss of As the World Turns in a new post immediately following this one.

___________________________________________

By Marlena De Lacroix

I broke into tears when I heard that As the World Turns was canceled yesterday. I’m sure many of you did, too. ATWT has been a part of all our lives for so long. I learned so much from it over the years about universal values of love and family. Since its 1956 premiere, it has so reflected the true heart of all Americans.

When I first started watching as a young teen in 1969, I was growing up in Queens, where everyone in my neighborhood was either Jewish or Italian (I was both!). My Italian immigrant grandparents, who loving fed me lasagna on holidays, knew little English. My Jewish immigrant

CBS President Les Moonves apparently doesn’t think TV is about the hearts and minds of Americans anymore. Yesterday he had the gall to say that the day of daytime soap operas like ATWT is over. Well, to hell with you, Les Moonves. Love, family and soaps will outlast you and your insults to those who have supported CBS for more than 60 years. ATWT lives!

side all worked in a family movie theater chain and absolutely lived for latest happenings in the entertainment world. My own parents constantly [Read more…]